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A "Weapon Of Starvation": The Politics, Propaganda, And Morality Of Britain's Hunger Blockade Of Germany, 1914-1919, Alyssa Cundy

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This dissertation examines the British naval blockade imposed on Imperial Germany between the outbreak of war in August 1914 and the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles in July 1919. The blockade has received modest attention in the historiography of the First World War, despite the assertion in the British official history that extreme privation and hunger resulted in more than 750,000 German civilian deaths. This revelation of a humanitarian disaster may be the main reason why the British government delayed public release of the history for nearly thirty years after its completion in the 1930s. Yet scholarship has focused …